While sitting at tonight’s lecture, I couldn’t help but think about the idea of persona. We've spent a lot of time in class talking about the finer points of language and its significance in literary theory and analysis--all well and good, especially considering it is a literary criticism class. However, after the last few readings--particularly the reading on Freud--as well as points brought up in tonight's lectures by both Doug and Pam, I think the idea of the persona contained within language is particularly fascinating.
The Internet has really brought the idea of presenting a persona to the greater world wide web into the foreground. But as Pam and Doug pointed out tonight, people have been projecting personas for as long as humankind has existed. Doug’s discussion on Henry VI gives us an example of a persona that’s created by people outside of the individual--rivals, loyal subjects, historians, and the like. There wasn’t much discussion on how Henry VI presented himself to the world; the majority of our understanding of Henry VI comes through other people (as far as I can tell).
Elizabeth Gaskell, on the other hand, gave us abundant material to analyze. As Pam showed us, Gaskell was a prolific letter writer and collector. Her letters--particularly those to her fellow writers--present Gaskell as a thoughtful, enthusiastic, and intelligent writer. This is a persona Gaskell herself cultivated; it the side of her she wanted her audience to see. Gaskell created her persona, whereas Henry VI’s persona was subject to the opinions and motives of his contemporaries.
What does this have to do with Freud (or the rest of the theorists) you might ask? Well, as the introduction pointed out, Freud thought “human reason was not master in its own house but a precarious defense mechanism struggling against, and often motivated by, unconscious desires and forces” (807). I would suggest (and I suspect there will be little argument against this) that these unconscious forces are also the motivators behind our tendencies to project personas to the world, whether we realize it or not. For instance, I may project myself as confident and intelligent not because that is how I naturally am, but rather because I am a woman with penis envy and I want to portray myself in as manly a way as possible. It all comes back to unconscious desires and influences, after all.
And now you might be asking: What does this have to do with literary theory at all? Well, think back to the signified/signifier relationship as defined by Saussure, but put it into Freud’s terms. For Saussure, the external world remains nebulous until it is articulated through language. We could apply this to Freud as well, I think--we as individuals exist, but it’s nebulous until it is articulated through a persona that we have created, whether consciously (as Gaskell did) or unconsciously. In essence, then, the signifier is a persona of the signified.
Of course, these may just be the late-night ramblings of someone who’s way off in left field after the 9th inning is long over. Your thoughts?
I appreciated your application of Freud to this situation. I was made to think of Freud for a similar and slightly different reason. I thought Doug's idea of not being able to control our "meaning" after we die relates to the way that Freud went back and invested Shakespeare with the same guilt for a fulfilled Oedipus complex that Hamlet felt. Of course it was backwards with Shakespeare; he lost his son, Hamnet." Freudian criticism makes us very vulnerable in our self-signification. Since him, we have to worry about trying to write a fun children's book about a train going through a tunnel and being called a pervert. Lame.
ReplyDeleteMorgan,
ReplyDeleteGood theoretical synthesis of Pam's and my talks. Yeah, in a way, theory is trying to figure out who controls whom or what.